


To Never Be Known

by Treegoats



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Aftermath of Violence, Gen, Mentions of Suicidal Ideation and/or Self-Sacrifice, POV Sansa Stark, Past Murder, Past Rape/Non-con, Sansa Stark-centric, Theon Greyjoy-centric, Trouble communicating, aftermath of abuse, self-hate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:49:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26515471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Treegoats/pseuds/Treegoats
Summary: Sansa meets Theon again in Winterfell.The reunion is not as uncomplicated as she might have hoped.
Relationships: Past Ramsay Bolton/Theon Greyjoy - Relationship, Theon Greyjoy & Sansa Stark, Theon Greyjoy/Sansa Stark, past Ramsay Bolton/Sansa Stark - Relationship
Comments: 14
Kudos: 54





	To Never Be Known

Sansa keeps marvelling at Theon, keeps trailing him with her eyes, and she knows they won't understand her, as they didn't understand their hug, she knows they will misinterpret what they see.

But Theon looks _healthy_ , for one, if weary. He's clean, too, soft-haired and curly, and he smelled _good_ , of salt and leather and pine. Most of all, she marvels at the way he stands, the way he moves-- with a limp, yes, but with purpose, the way he speaks as if he had a right to.

Her last memory of him was--

If _Theon_ of all people could change from _then_ to this, after everything, there might be hope left. Maybe even for her.

\--

She's been holding her tension for so, so long. She holds it tight in the black of her clothing, in the ice of her eyes, in the coldness of her voice. _To never be hurt again, to never be ruled again._

Even Jon doesn't understand her, even Jon who came back from the dead to warn of a horror no one would believe, Jon who's been so long at war. Even Arya, who travelled to the edge of the world and back, who was dismantled and reshapen. They both know much about death and love and fear, yet even they _can't_ understand what it means for Sansa to live within these walls that were her home were her prison were her torture chambers, what it means for her to be _Lady Of Winterfell_ while wearing her mother's face.

Theon, on the other hand...

She finds him in the kennels, as she suspected she would, and the fact that they share the knowledge of this place, this alone hitches the breath in her lungs.

He's standing before the cell he was kept in, looking very sad and maybe a little bit proud. When he turns to her, she imagines a question in his eyes.

"It is here that I murdered him," Sansa tells him. She points out the precise spot. The stone floor is dark and scrubbed clean.

Theon nods. "I heard of it," he says.

"I tied him to a chair and had him devoured by the hounds," Sansa continues.

"So I was told," says Theon.

The silence presses against her throat.

"Do you think me monstrous?" Sansa prompts, finally and Theon looks at her with the most incredulous little smile and memories just so pile up in between them

\-- _horrors, horrors, horrors_ \--

and Theon answers, very very softly, as if afraid to unsettle the layers of the question: "I'm not fit to judge that." She feels ice tighten closer around her heart at this answer which is no answer at all. "But, Sansa..." he continues, and while he looks dead tired there's neither fear nor condemnation in his eyes: "It's better with him dead."

\--

He looks healthy enough, but not fully. Not with his weary eyes, not in the careful, brittle way he moves, not with the way he's so ready to pledge himself as self-sacrifice to Bran.

_Stay here, I'll lure them away,_

she remembers,

and she knows in her guts it isn't right, not after everything. But Bran accepts the offer, and they might all die, and so does she.

\--

They sit in a room full of people, yet apart, holding their wine and their ale, fire dancing in their hair.

"I told him no one would remember his name," Sansa is recounting. "He was gloating, you know in that way he did, that he'll always be a part of me. I didn't _want_ to give him the satisfaction. I told him that all memory of him would disappear."

Theon is listening, silent. 

"But I do remember him, every night," Sansa admits, and shame grips her voice as she speaks it out loud. 

How shameful, too, part of her adds, that of everything, _everything_ they could talk about tonight, it's Ramsay Bolton - yet again - that she keeps speaking of. He doesn't deserve to be spoken of.

But it's true: She remembers him every night, and she tried to explain that truth to others without quite naming it, and she's been so lonely with it. Sansa's been married to bad men, that much is known, and she's been a bit broken from it, and she's been made a bit wiser for it, so it's said, and it's sad, surely, but it's not like she's been in a war, has she? It's not like she's been at the end of the world.

Theon, though, Theon knows where she has been.

He gives her no reproach for her choice of conversation.  
"I remember him always," he admits. 

He would, wouldn't he, she thinks, as she sees the stiff bent of his maimed hands, how he must lean his elbow against his forearm to relieve his shoulder, the way he avoids his left leg.

He follows her gaze. "Not just that," he says. "That, too, of course, but, not just that."

Sansa waits for him to go on. There's laughter filling the room, and warmth. Over to the side people loudly hoot for more wine. They are cocooned by it, by the difference of it.

"Do you know that I loved him, Sansa?" he says, finally, and for a second the grief in his eyes is overwhelming.

"I remember that," she says. 

The fearful adoration that revolted her so, back then. _Yes, Master, of course, Master, Reek will be good, Master._ The dog that licked the boot that kept kicking him. The creature that did _everything_ the Master commanded, even-- 

"I mourned him," he adds in a whisper, in a challenge, as if awaiting the wrath of her judgement, like he can't wait for her to finally hit him.

Oh, so she _is_ the monster after all?

No. She takes his hand instead and he twitches in surprise and for a second she thinks he'll flinch away, but he allows the touch.

They look at each other and he looks _different_ and, she hopes, so does she.

"I'm so sorry," she says, with intent. 

He scoffs, but gently. " _You_ have nothing to be sorry for..." he answers.

"For the things I said, for the way I looked at you," she clarifies.

"I de--"

_I deserved them._

He doesn't say it. He stops himself. A small mercy for the both of them: He learned not to say it.

"You did not deserve them, that is my point, Theon," she says, maybe a bit more forcefully than she should. "I witnessed your torture and in my despair, I condoned it, and for this I am sorry. Will you accept my apology?"

But he shakes his head. "You have nothing to apologise for," he repeats, and heavy lead sinks over her heart.

He _looks_ healthier, yes, but--

 _Theon, shambling into her room, face smashed, dripping blood, trying his best to follow his_ _orders. Theon, sitting at Ramsays feet, eyes delirious from hunger, leaning into Ramsay's touch. Theon's hollow voice: I deserve to be Reek. Ramsay's hand---  
_ .   
.

Theon grips her hand, pulls her back into the room.

"You killed him, remember?" he says, and his smile is so unlike any expression she saw on Reek, and this is _different_. They are different.

"I took his death away from you," she realises.

He shakes his head, sadly. "I would never have been able to kill him, you know that, Sansa."

She knows.

And when he says: "Thank you that you did," she's not sure he fully means it, she's not sure _Reek_ could mean it, but he does say it and she needed to hear it. He is the only person in the entire world who understands what it means to have killed Ramsay Bolton.

The monster is dead and they are allowed to feel about him how they will.

The mulled wine is hot in her belly and loud laughter rings through the hall and over there sits Arya in conversation with Brienne and over there sits Jon, solid and alive, and it's warm and and it's home.

"I'm sorry for helping him hurt you," he tells her, now, and oh how she wished he didn't, but she started the ill-fated apologies in light of the incoming apocalypse, she started this wretched conversation, didn't she? He looks so ready to withdraw, like she'll pull back in disgust now that he mentions it. Like she'll remember he's revolting.

(As if she ever forgets.)

"You didn't have a choice," she tells him, even though she remembers  
, she remembers,  
,

He shakes his head. "You always have a choice," he decides.

That's true, but still. We make mistakes out of fear and foolishness and despair, but under the world-shattering reality of physical pain, all truth evaporates. One cannot speak of choice or mistake, there. Pain obliterates all. She learned that lesson from Ramsay. But she doesn't need to tell Theon of it, because he knows this better than all, and yet, that's how he decided to see it.

"He hurt you, too," she says. 

"He certainly did," he agrees.

"And I did nothing to stop that, either," she says.

He shrugs. "That was not in your power to."

Well, that's true.

 _To never be powerless again_ , she remembers.

"Sansa," he says, and maybe he recognises something in her face, because now it's him who reaches for her hand, him who leans forward so she might understand him fully. "It was you who first reminded me I have a choice. Do you understand? _You saved me_."

And Sansa, iced heart and frozen soul, Sansa who had to become monstrous to cling to wretched survival, Sansa who never got to be a hero, Sansa can't hold her tears any longer, and here they are hugging again.

\--

They meet in the courtyard and he's at work, preparing, and she's at work, preparing, and everything is so, so, different, from when this was Ramsay's place.

But she will never forget Reek the servant toiling in the snow, half-starved, and battered and mad. And she sees the limp in his gait and the contained pain in his movement when he prepares the bows and _why_ actually does he have to be the one to do this?

He sees her approaching and steps aside to smile at her.

"Theon, I don't want you to die," she says, bluntly.

"I learned a saying, on Essos," he says, easy smirk on his lips.

She resists smiling back. "I'm serious, Theon. Why do you have to do this?"

His lips fold in half-confusion, half-irritation. "You know why," he says.

"No, I don't, in fact," she replies. "Illuminate me."

He looks lost, for a moment, and hurt, and she already regrets what she started. He straightens, like it's a test, like she was his Queen:

"I perpetrated crimes and treason against your House. I harmed you and your family. While I can never amend what I've broken, if I can be of any help at all, I want to help." Then he adds, as if suddenly unsure if a welcome has been rescinded: "If you'll have me, that is."

Sansa's throat narrows at what she's doing. _That's not at all what she wanted._ "No, Theon..." she says, reaching a hand out for him. "I meant..." What did she mean? "I mean, _Theon, I don't want you to die_ ," she repeats, unable to find better words. 

He looks at her, still tense, still confused. "I'm sorry," he says, part question, part statement.

She takes a breath, tries to sort out her thoughts. "Do you really think you must self-sacrifice to make amends, Theon?" she formulates, finally.

"... I _might_ survive," he says, "mightn't I?"

"Do you want to?" she challenges, and there, _there_ , she finally got to the heart of the matter, because a sane man would not hesitate so in his answer.

"Sansa," he says, finally, neck taut, like it's a game where he can misstep any second and tumble into horror. "I don't understand what you want from me." He steps back, in deference, in wariness. "I'll do _whatever_ you command. But, Sansa, don't you want me to fight for you?"

And Sansa feels fully rotten, because he's right. He's _right_ , she's confusing him and confusing matters that have already been decided. Is _this_ how the Lady of Winterfell behaves in the days before battle?

"I'm sorry, Theon," she says. "I am very grateful that you are here. We must all do our part. Forgive me."

He nods, accepting, courteous, though she fears the damage has been done, what with the uneasy gaze he throws her. She retreats, before she starts to cry.

\--

No, _this is not right_ , but she's not sure what isn't. Nothing's been right. She's not been right. Stupid little dove. Sansa, cruel little Sansa. I'm a part of you, now, Sansa. He carved her skin rotten, he armed her with pain. Everything she now touches turns to hurt. She swallowed the monsters and they became her.

\--

She is Sansa Stark of Winterfell and this is her home. She will not let ghosts decide her fate. She will not let _them_ decide what she is.

She finds Theon again. He is resting, in a corner of the yard, sitting on snowy crates, surrounded by men and yet separate, always separate. She brings ale, the one he likes, as token of apology.

"I want to apologise," she tells him.

"You have nothing to--" he says and she holds up a hand against the interruption and then they start laughing, because aren't they just repeating themselves?

"Seriously, Theon," she insists, regaining her breath, tension lifted, but she still has to say what she came to say. "Hear me out. I don't want to lose you. But it was selfish of me to bring it up and burden you with it, when none of us know if we'll survive the next moon. I'm sorry."

He looks at her with something like wonder, and she's not sure which part of her statement he finds so wonderful.

"You were right, though," he admits, finally. "I did want to die. But, Sansa, you realise that's not the reason I'm here?" He looks at her and there's no hesitation in his eyes, not today. "I could have died a hundred times, if I had chosen to. _I want to help_."

She nods.

"Your guilt, it's still madness, though", she replies, unwilling to mince her words any more, and that stuns him.

"It's ...appropriate," he protests.

"It's the knife _he_ twisted through your mind for years," Sansa replies.

 _Because I deserved it_ , she can just so read in his eyes.

"Oh, will you _stop_ acting like you're the only monster, here?" she snaps, suddenly and unexpectedly angry. "Will you stop hogging all the guilt for yourself?"

"What?-- but, who?" he stammers, not quite keeping up with the plot, nor her pace, and Sansa can't manage to hold back the ice in her voice as she bites: "Don't you know what I am, Theon?"

His eyes are uncomprehending and now he's getting that look again, the one where he's trying to guess the right answer, the one that won't get him hurt. "You're Lady of Winterfell," he answers. "You're Sansa Stark. You're my... you're Sansa?" 

His _actual_ sister is on the Iron Islands and he left her to fight for Winterfell and this is how Sansa keeps repaying him. She forces herself to relax. That here is _not_ who she is.

"I'm sorry," she says, for what feels like the hundredth time, "sorry for being..." But she's not fully sure what she's being. "I'm just glad you're here, Theon, I am," she insists, as if to make it fully true.

Theon nods his head, like caught in a confusing riddle he can't figure his way through, yet ever accepting of what is thrown his way. He smiles back at her smile, docile. She can see his broken teeth, she remembers the fists that taught him this docility. _Do what he says, do what he says or he'll hurt you._ "So am I," he agrees, and when he says it, it sounds fully true.

And maybe that should be enough for her, that they are both alive, dressed in warm furs, drinking spicy ale, and none of them here is currently being tortured. Maybe that should be enough.

\--

So this is the worst wound: He is the only one, the _only_ one who knows. The only one who was _there_. Her only witness. They've shared horror. And he's confused by her.

He sits at her table, posture tense with pain - not soul pain but bodily pain, hammered into his bones -, eyes dazed with ancient tiredness, and she can't reach him. What she tries to tell him of her truth, what she tries to communicate of her experience, he doesn't understand.

He can't understand her. It was better when she knew her loneliness. This, though, this swallows her.

And what right does she have to demand understanding from this man she saw brutalised over and over again, daily and in hundreds of ways, by the man who was her husband, and back then she didn't at all _care_? Selfish Sansa.

Oh, _to never need again_.

\--

They have cast their webs around her, the Cerseis, the Littlefingers, even the Margaerys of this world (and she loved Margaery and Margaery loved her, and yet--). Maybe she's cursed, now. Theon, for all he's been twisted by violence, never learned their cloaked language of subtle deception, never learned to layer his tongue. Sansa, though, has been tainted. She doesn't _want_ to manipulate, she doesn't want to play with him. ( _Let's play a game!_ Ramsay rejoices in her mind, and it's unforgivable, _unforgivable_ to play games at _Theon_ ). But maybe she doesn't remember how to just _be_. _"Do you think me monstrous?"_ she remembers herself asking, and she knows the answer, it's yes, yes, yes

"Oh, will you _stop_ your self-pity? It is so _very_ tiring", Cersei says.

\--

So Sansa goes to work.

She talks with Jon, she talks with Brienne, she talks with her men, she talks with the cooks, she talks with the smiths, she talks with Lady Mormont. She manages and plots and orders and decides. She leaves Theon Greyjoy alone-- he's already been hurt enough. Dragons roam the sky and foreign armies settle at the gates and an Undead Dread is on the march and _this is her home, this is her home, this is her home_ , she reminds herself.

\--

She sees him sitting by his soup, surrounded yet apart, as always. He smiles when he sees her, a smile that invites her over. She takes her cup and her bowl and she sits down in front of him.

"You've been busy," he says, and Sansa's back tingles and her features freeze but she remembers: This is not King's Landing and this is Theon. He is not speaking in code for "I took note that you've been avoiding me and I will demand explanations". He actually believes she's been too busy, as Lady of Winterfell, to talk to him. He assumes himself just that low in her priorities, and he finds no fault in that.

Her heart twinges. _Don't mistreat him_ , she tells herself.

"I have," she agrees, since it's a truth. "And how have _you_ been?"

He shrugs, softly. "Overwhelmed by the memories of this place," he answers. "Grateful to be here."

It undoes her, his honesty.

She's so afraid of her own tongue and how it twists that she silently takes his hand, instead, holds it tight with both of hers. Better to not speak. She hopes he understands her intent without her words, and from the way he looks at her in wonder, maybe he does.

\--

It's been snowing throughout the day and most of the night, layering new snow over old, and when they find each other on the ramparts, the world is clean crisp white.

He's a night time wanderer, she noticed, and so is she, when she needs to think. They join their paths, silently. The fresh snow crunches under their feet, glimmers pale in the smoke-blue of early dawn.

Without exchanging directions, they came to stand in front of the wall they escaped from. 80 feet, it is said, and it looks impossible, _impossible_ , looking down that deep black expanse of stone, that they survived.

Sansa remembers Reek, greasy-haired, panic-eyed, determined to die, if necessary, if it would save her, rememebers how he gripped her hand and she his, before they jumped.

 _Impossible_ , that he survived.

"How did you do it?" she asks him. "How did you become Theon Greyjoy, again?"

He leans his hands on the wall, into the snow, looks down, just like she. "I didn't," he answers. "I became something else."

She looks at him, forms her question with her eyes, but he just laughs softly. "Maybe I'm Reek, actually," he teases, unwilling to have himself be unravelled, unwilling to let himself be named, and Gods, how he changed.

"You changed for the better," she tells him, sadly. "But I changed for the worse."

He frowns, now. "Why do you say such a thing?"

She hugs her elbows, stares down the abyss. "I'm scared," she says.

"So am I!" he says, quickly. "I'm scared all the time."

"I'm scared I became like _them_ ," she specifies. "I'm scared of my own evil." She sees his look, sees his mouth opens in protest, so she quickly adds, sharply: " _Don't_ deny me this fear!" So he doesn't.

"The execution of Littlefinger-- I revelled in it" she confesses, and she can feel the chill of pleasure running though her spine, still, at the memory of her revenge. "I watched the hounds devour Ramsay and it was ... euphoric. And you've known my cruelty, too."

She finds his expression impossible to place, as he looks at her, but there's a kind of sudden violence in his eyes, when he answers: "Do you see the gates, down there, Sansa?" She sees. "That's where I hung the two small boys I murdered. I hung them there for all to see." He points down another spot in the yard. "Over there, do you see? Is where I beheaded Ser Rodrik. I botched it, though, so he suffered terribly. Bran and Rickon watched. Bran begged me to stop, he cried and cried, but I wouldn't. And there," he points. "Over there by that corner, I beat up one of my men, because he wounded my pride." 

She grips her fingers into the snow, to dispel her nausea.

"Theon, I'm not going to start hating you again", she tells him, and it's final. She won't. She knows what he was and she knows what he is. Theon Greyjoy has been tortured for years for his crimes. He's been flayed and cut and whipped and starved and hung and battered and mutilated and raped and that's just the start of it and she will not participate further in this.

"All I'm saying, Sansa, is: You're not evil".

 _Stop hogging all the guilt to yourself_ , she wants to spit out, again, but in light of what he just said, the reproach evaporates. Let him keep his guilt, if he needs it so.

"How would you know?" she says, instead.

She can see his many possible answers -- _Because I knew evil. Because I've been evil, so I can tell it. Because I've witnessed evil. Because I served evil. Because I've been tortured by evil_ \-- but he refuses to make his case further, refuses to dance his words. "You're not evil," he simply repeats, dogged, determined. 

She sighs, breath cloudy white in the freeze. The sun is raising its first tentrils and this place of so many horrors, this home of theirs, shines in its early pinkish light.

"Let's just go back," she says, tired to the bone, "where there's our work to do."

\--

She doesn't want him to die. She still really, _really_ doesn't want him to die. And he offered to serve her and the thought has crossed her mind more than once to simply order him not to fight. To order him to stay at her side, to hide away with her. Broken by loyalty that he is, trained that he still is, he might just obey, and he might just survive.

But it's _Bran_ he offered to protect, and Bran accepted, and she now understands this is something she may not tread on. _Bran begged me to stop, he cried and cried, but I wouldn't._ Of all of them still alive, Bran is the only one who knew Theon as his monster. It's both their right to decide, certainly. And yet, it's still wrong, she thinks, to sacrifice Theon like a piece in chess.

\--

She finds him eating his soup with slow sips, careful with the shattered teeth, careful with a jaw broken too many times. After all they've been through, he still looks so pleasantly surprised, so humbly baffled when she choses to approach him. Like she should want to be anywhere but near him and it's a never-ending marvel that she doesn't. Like she's a fickle sun rising and he's a creature warming itself in her sun.

"You're not evil," he told her, and Sansa thinks that Arya and Jon and Brienne and even Bran would tell her the same, probably, but it's only Theon who looks at her as if she was pure salvation.

\--

The night is dark, yet lit by fires. They're surrounded by bustle and food smells and solid human noise. Theon sits in front of her, warm cup in hand, eyes dark with knowledge and determination. Soon, they will all die, surrounded by horror, maybe.

Sansa doesn't think she already knows horror, because she remembers the look on Jon's face when he speaks of the White Walkers, and she learned by now that to know one horror doesn't allow you to know them all. She reaches for Theon's hand but she doesn't try to reach for his unreachable soul. She doesn't try to sneak her pain into his pain. She just warms herself at his presence, as he does at hers. They eat in comfortable silence.

"... I _might_ survive, mightn't I?" he said and by all the Gods, the old and the new, hers and his, she prays that he will.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, thanks for reading, and thanks for your comments and kudos !


End file.
